This was a vote that had very little dissent; it easily surpassed the supermajority that was required to amend the constitution.
There was only one major group that spoke out against the decision: the Catholic Church.
Almost half of the French population reported that they were Catholic in a 2020 survey, but it's clear that when it comes to abortion, almost no French Catholics are influenced by the Church's strong opposition to abortion.
That's in stark contrast to the US, where opposition to abortion, mostly among Christian denominations, has remained an intractable issue. People predicted that after Roe V. Wade was decided, opposition to abortion would fade away, but it never did. Indeed, for the better part of 50 years, opposition fluctuated only a few percentage points, unlike almost every other major social issue.
> Almost half of the French population reported that they were Catholic
If you break that down generationally, you see 70% in 70+, scaling down to about 15% in young adults, with atheism mopping up the difference. The older people may have believed, the middle cohort were raised by believers and think of themselves as Catholic by creed, but they haven't passed it on to their kids.
The same is generally true in the rest of Europe. The social contract that everyone goes to church on Sunday has broken.
I am English, and spend a fair bit of time in France.
In France particularly, the state is aggressively secular. They go out of their way to ensure no religion has any footing in any part of government and this occasionally makes it hard to be religious if you're unable to wear the expected garb or paraphernalia at school or at your government job.
The French have a long history of not wanting a single unimpeachable ruler. God just isn't welcome.
Part of it is that for a lot of Europeans this is still in living memory I think.
It’s really interesting to me how recently some “modern, first-world countries” were still dictatorships or still undergoing rapid democratization. France, Spain, and Korea are all dramatic examples, we totally don’t think of it in this context but at the start of the 80s Korea was a backwater under a military dictatorship, in the 50s France was a quasi dictatorship under de Gaulle with internal instability and unrest, Spain was under a fascist dictator until 1975, etc.
Plus there is the other factor that the structure of European cities and societies is much more amenable to protests and political action, where the US citizenry is atomized by design.
Being Christian in Europe and the US are two completely different experiences. The two chief differences that I notice:
1. In Europe it is sort of the default state. Everyone belongs to the same Church. It is not really part of one's identity. American Christians are so splintered that being part of a Church means being part of a significantly smaller community and that plays a much bigger role in forming one's identity. The community aspect of Church is similarly more pronounced in the US for this reason.
2. American Jesus is your personal trainer, your protector, your personal cheerleader, your forever companion. European Jesus is technically supposed to also be those things but nobody really buys into it. The fervent belief in the efficacy of prayer is completely lacking. That gives people less incentive to go to Church.
I don’t know about the US but Point 1 definitely resonates with me.
I grew up in the Republic of Ireland during the 1980s when the vast majority (more than 90%) of people identified as Roman Catholics. I took it all very seriously (prayed multiple times each day, read the bible, a little theology, lives of saints, etc.) but my fellow Christians didn’t take anywhere near seriously: attending Mass on a Sunday, first communions, confirmations, weddings and funerals. While they might vote against abortion and divorce and send their children to Catholic schools, their beliefs didn’t really impact their daily lives.
Some of my parents’ generation believed in the efficacy of prayer:I always had my other and other relations praying for me during exams and if anyone was ever sick or having medical treatment, they would be prayed for. But most of my own generation didn’t share this belief in the efficacy of prayer. They certainly didn’t buy into the concept of Jesus/God being an integral part of their lives.
The Catholic church had the dominant position, so other than controlling educational, medical and other institutes, it provide its members with the same sense of community as that of Church of Ireland and other minority religions.
On the other hand, with its diversity of Christian churches, north of the border was much more like how you describe the US. The identity with religion was (is) much stronger as it usually corresponds with the individual’s national identity (Irish or British).
Note: Support for the Catholic Church in the Republic declined drastically in the nineties when the church lost its moral authority as news came out about how the hierarchy had facilitated child abuse and various other scandals.
I'm from Belgium, born in 1979, so I'll give you some insight since you're interested :).
My grandparents (farmers) went to church every Sunday. In those days it was kind of like a central meeting place to meet your neighbors. The Church back then also tried to push certain rules on people, that people for obvious reasons didn't like so much. I know my grandma never really believed in god, but my grandpa did.
My parents are like half-believers. I guess they believe in something, but that generation already knows Jesus didn't really walk on water etc. They might still believe in an afterlife. They had periods where we went to church every week, and other periods where we didn't go.
Then my generation: we were raised in school as rational people. And as you might know, rationality and religion never go well together. None of my male buddies believes in any religion. We might have a good laugh about it, and find the concept overall ludicrous and obviously false. It's 100% clear to us that it's all bullshit and make-believe.
For the women, they believe in "something", something "bigger than us". That's all I can say about it.
But overall, the Church has lost it's power due to lecturing people what they should and shouldn't do, and also obvious false claims, misconduct, etc. Nobody likes the one who claims to know better than the rest.
My wife is from Slovakia, and I would say they are running about 1 generation behind concerning religion. Churches there are now getting less and less people, while in Belgium that already happened a generation ago.
We still have certain regions that are more religious than others. And I know in the Netherlands there is a 'bible belt' where people are extremely religious, not taking anti-conception and all those other rules (they end up having 12 kids).
If you teach people rationality and learning to be sceptic, it's hard to sell them on something where you can live forever, as long as you follow some rules made up 2000 years ago.
But did your grandparents really believe? What was different about the cultural situation that they lived in and yours? Or were they just a different kind of person who found it easier to believe?
I think the big difference is information. My grandparents were born around 1920. There was no radio, no TV. It would surprise me if they had any form of newspaper (I need to ask my dad). Their world was very small, situated under the church tower.
So all info basically came from what they knew from their parents, the farm, their neighbors, and on Sunday what the priest said. There were school teachers of course, which were regarded the same as a doctor or lawyer. But their own knowledge was probably also very limited science wise.
Like I said before, even if they didn't really believe, they would still go to Church on Sunday. One of my granddads had a more religious family, and his brother was a Monk and sister a Nun.
My parents know the introduction of radio & TV. People get smarter, know more, probably also start questioning things more. And my generation, well, we had an excellent education. It's very hard to not start questioning things.
In the end, I think it starts deteriorating step by step. First it starts out with "Probably Jesus didn't really walk on water, it's just a matter of speech." And then it's other things. People get smarter, in their own lifetime but also over generations. It wouldn't surprise me if my grandparents and parents were more religious when they were younger.
Also, I was told there was a cinema where people would go to watch movies (before TV). The priest would go see the new movie first, and then tell everyone if they were allowed to go see that movie or not. People don't like that kind of control, and start rebelling against it. "The priest sees all the dirty things but we're not allowed".
At least for me, it feels like I started questioning things. I believed in God up until I was around 12. It also felt rebellious to know that it was all bullshit, while everyone else said it was real. But I guess it wasn't really rebellious since almost all boys of my age thought the same thing, especially at the age of 15.
Not a European, but an American lapsed Catholic. I mean... it's pretty obvious that religion is make-believe, right? I'd love to believe it, but I've never seen one iota of evidence for beliefs of the church. Basically there was no reason to keep going once I realized that, other than to make my parents happy.
> it's pretty obvious that religion is make-believe, right?
If it were that self-apparent, wouldn't we expect Kant, Kierkegaard, Anselm, Anscombe, Heidegger, Gödel, or the countless other philosophers and heavy thinkers of the past several centuries to have not even wrestled with the question?
Heck, even Antony Flew, a contemporary philosopher of religion who was a staunch advocate of atheism for much of his career, later declared himself a theist. Did he simply fail to realize that it's pretty obvious that religion is make-believe?
What do you know that they didn't? What did they know that you might not?
There have always been a number of reasons for why somebody might believe in the supernatural, the sibling comment points out one of them. Two important reasons have declined substantially over the last 200 years.
First, the "God of the gaps" has basically disappeared. All natural phenomena in our personal experience are understood well enough that we can say with confidence that nothing supernatural is required to explain them. That doesn't mean that every individual understands them well enough, and while it's not a hard binary distinction, there is certainly a correlation between spirituality / belief in the supernatural and lack of understanding of natural science.
Second, religion is to a large extent social glue. As humans increasingly live in large cities, social glue in general is disappearing, and religion is just one facet of that.
It's because the implications suck - our consciousness is nothing more than a physical phenomenon; we are the meat in our heads. Once that meat dies, we're gone forever. It's not an easy thing to deal with.
> It's because the implications suck - our consciousness is nothing more than a physical phenomenon; we are the meat in our heads. Once that meat dies, we're gone forever. It's not an easy thing to deal with.
I've heard both theists and atheists express similar feelings about the implications of physicalism (I think that's the term, but I'm not a philosopher), but I've never understood why in anything other than an abstract sense. I can understand why someone would be concerned by things ending so finally, but it's not like you'll be around afterward to feel bad about it. If anything I find it very comforting.
I can understand wanting to be around for other people, but afaik there are plenty of religions where people aren't able to intervene after death and I don't hear the same concerns about those.
It goes beyond the fear of death. Much of western society is built on the Christian notion of divinity of man. The Declaration of Independence says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable right[s]." There is an internal logic to this statement. It starts with the premise that God created man, and proceeds to assume that, in doing so, he endowed man with "unalienable rights."
Supposedly secular western people invoke the same basic concept. For example, they talk about things like "human dignity": https://www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/definitions-what-i... ("At its most basic, the concept of human dignity is the belief that all people hold a special value that’s tied solely to their humanity."). That papers over God as the source of "human dignity" but it's expressing the same basic belief. That assertion makes no logical sense if you abandon the underlying metaphysical notion and posit that humans are actually just meat.
No, it's not just because of the implications. It's because materialism is illogical. If materialism were true, you would not have any immaterial concepts. But clearly you do.
There's no such thing as a truly immaterial concept. The most implausible, logically contradictory or essentially abstract thought exists only insofar as there is a material configuration of state representation, and it is this physical representation with which other concepts, also configurations of physical matter, interact through the medium of energic exchange, all driven by the universal pull of entropic degradation.
Abstract concepts, even ones considered materially 'incomprehensible' like love, or ones considered materially inconsistent or impossible like taking the square root of a circle, are names - very long, patterned symbol sequences condensed from salient features of the far more complex structures they reflect, objects that would be otherwise inconvenient to discuss or contemplate on human time scales and within human constraints. Abstract information, any information, is the result of an energetic compromise necessary for our relatively insubstantial chunk of brain tissue to be able to play-manipulate objects far greater in scale, scope and remoteness then it physically could interact with. But it is still physically manipulating them, or rather the lightest of lightweight representations of them, at the mechnical, physical matrix of neurological energy exchange processes.
Immaterial concepts are abstracted from the physical world, but they in themselves are immaterial. You can hide this plain fact in all the mumbo-jumbo you want, but it remains a fact. Even a simple concept, like the definition of a circle, is not material in itself.
When you get right down to the brass tacks of any system, science, philosophy, mathematics, all of them require you to take a leap of faith.
What came before the big bang? And why does it seem that all matter came from one ___location in space? Seems to break the second law of Thermodynamics even. We don't know. Will you put your faith in the idea that the system of science CAN EVEN know eventually?
Can set theory prove everything? We know that it cannot prove a number of things, thanks Turing. Those things end up being pretty important to proving everything evidently. Science rests on mathematics.
Why should you believe in a particular philosopher's revealed truth? Well it seems consistent with the rules of logic. Seeing as set theory is the most concrete, repeatable form of logic we've ever come up with, see the above for why thats maybe not the best stance to put your faith in.
Maybe believe in nothing? But you will believe in something, even by accident. The nature of human heart is to make idols.
All require leaps of faith at the bottom of them. Either in systems or individuals.
I don't think the whole postmodernist, nothing means anything take really adds any support to the Catholic church being fundamentally right. As a kid who caught a condition that causes me disability and chronic pain to this day, all I can say is that if god exists, he's a fucking dick.
I believe you, it sounds like you're living in a form of hell on Earth as it stands.
My two cents, before thinking about the Catholic Church or any Church's claims for that matter, form a relationship with Jesus/God. You seem like a pretty tuned in person, I feel that you will find your answers. If we are made in His image, and He gave his only Son up to be tortured and killed for us, there is no way your suffering goes unnoticed.
Without that relationship, every Church is just a bunch of rules to follow, and ya, that would really suck to be involved with. God bless you on your journey.
Philosophy - is backed by reasoned arguments and open to debate
Mathematics - is our construction, how can we not believe in our own invention
Religion - requires that you buy into an archaic fairy tale, with no empirical proof or reasoned argument, to the extent that you will sanction wars and oppressive gender inequality on the basis of unsubstantiated belief
You can be an atheist, but if you think religion is "obviously make-believe" than you're just being dishonest. The majority of the greatest minds to ever live were religious. You don't gain any IQ points by dismissing it altogether.
I'm not referring to any specific religion. I'm just saying they were religious. Which religious tradition has the most great minds is a separate question and I don't know the answer, but I would suspect Christianity. But all I'm saying here is that most great minds throughout history were religious.
I do, but it's hard for a single man's mind to comprehend the whole truth. I think generally you can only master a few aspects of it. I believe Catholicism is the correct religion, but I still admit that there have been many great minds from different religious traditions.
This is actually an integral part of the Catholic intellectual tradition, which is why Catholic philosophy (see St Thomas Aquinas for example) can incorporate insights from pagans, Muslims and Jews. Hans Urs von Balthasar took inspiration from an even wider variety of thinkers. I could go on but hopefully I've made my point.
I do wonder if I'm just wired differently from everyone else; I was essentially never able to believe in the Catholic stuff no matter what my parents tried. I can say, as someone who acquired a rare childhood disease that causes me pain and disability to this day, that if I do ever get a chance to talk to god, I'm going to call him a dick to his face.
And many others would do the same as you. But I must say I have far less respect for you than for those who offer their sufferings to God. And there are many of them, too.
Religion is—quite concededly—about faith and belief. What I find interesting, however, is how many non-theists resort to essentially theistic or metaphysical thinking. When it comes to “individual rights,” for example, supposedly secular people sound like “each person has inherent human dignity because they are created in God’s image!”
What the evidence shows is that we are meat, with sentience being an illusion of complex chemical reactions. What “rights” does meat have? Why can’t we, for example, kill drug dealers, if that would make life on earth—the only kind of life there is—better for all the other meat sacks? The Chinese communists at least practiced atheism correctly and followed it to its logical conclusions.
I think a more accurate characterization would be that European Christianity has evolved into a different religion which retains the notion of the divinity of the individual, but drops explicit references to God.
The Post-Vatican II Church teaches you can be saved in any religion and even in no religion, logically, if that were the case, then why would one bother with Catholicism? Modern clerics like Antipope Francis and Robert Barron don't even think people go to Hell.
Brother, I believe you. It seems like you feel deeply betrayed by the Church and I can resonate with where that comes from.
Please don't let this harden your heart to knowing Jesus and praying for God's grace.
No idea where you're getting your info from, but as sibling comment said, I doubt there are many "Democratic politicians" advocating for abortion until day before birth. Sorry to inform you, but it seems like you've been fed (and are repeating) misinformation.
> On the other side you argue for no restrictions, typically until the day before birth.
No you really don't. If you look at all the bans on "partial birth abortion" they don't allow for any exceptions at all, including to save the life of the mother, even if there's no hope of delivering a living baby. The lack of exceptions that shackle medical professionals in emergency situations are what pro-choice people are against. Pretty much everyone who is pro-choice wants to get abortion done as quickly and as soon as possible. In Washington state, the limits are 10 weeks for prescribing mifepristone, and fetal viability for D&E abortions. Literally nobody is trying to increase the limits beyond viability if there's no risk to the mother. Everyone likes the idea of easy access to mifepristone to get it done earlier.
Go ahead and try to find Democratic politicians that actually want to go beyond that. You can probably find some very hard leftists who will say things like that on twitter, because you can find literally any idiot for any position on twitter. You won't find anyone saying that who actually needs to get elected.
Meanwhile you do see Republican politicians actually banning all kinds of abortion even in cases of rape, when the health and safety of the mother is at risk, and when the fetus will be still or never viable due to medical conditions, which is why people refer to them as "forced birth" positions: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/texa...
It is really isn't two sides of this debate by politicians that are equally unreasonable. There is opposition to dropping viability (~23 weeks) down to something like 12 weeks because of the proof of the slippery slope where we can literally see by public statements and laws that are passed that Republicans don't respect exceptions for the health and safety of the mother and it is being done obviously in bad faith towards banning all abortion federally.
[ Ed: And that BBC article you cite has a lot of inflammatory quotes from Republicans CLAIMING it was about allowing abortion under all circumstances up until the day of delivery, when the actual quotes from Democrats are about fetal abnormalities and nonviable pregnancies which do not risk the life of the mother -- the mother forced to spend 5 days in the hospital with a child that was always going to be stillborn is a good example of where the Virginia law banned abortion in that case and why Democrats were trying to relax that language. You still can't provide a case of Democrats saying with their own words that they support entirely elective abortions with no medical justification right up until the day of birth. You can only find Republicans saying that they do, which isn't the same thing. ]
>On the other side you argue for no restrictions, typically until the day before birth
Only if you suck down way too much of the conservative news. The right wing media here makes up a lot of this bullshit that has zero basis in reality. Find one elected democratic official at the congressional level that says the day before birth is an acceptable solution.
Meanwhile look at the actual laws conservative states are passing. They are going for a total ban even in the case of rape and horrific birth defects. Don't both sides this. It's not even close.
> Only if you suck down way too much of the conservative news. The right wing media here makes up a lot of this bullshit that has zero basis in reality.
Is the BBC conservative news and/or right wing media?
> Find one elected democratic official at the congressional level that says the day before birth is an acceptable solution.
Here you go:
>> The Democrat who sponsored the measure said it would allow abortions at any point in pregnancy up until the point of childbirth in certain cases.
> Meanwhile look at the actual laws conservative states are passing. They are going for a total ban even in the case of rape and horrific birth defects. Don't both sides this. It's not even close.
This further reinforces my point above about the debate in the US being done at extremities. Alabama (I think) just had their abortion ban so extreme (defining life at conception) that they accidentally outlawed In-vitro Fertilization!
So back to my original point, I'm assuming you are pro-choice from your comment. Where do you draw the line? How many weeks is ok?
For normal non-life threatening situations where the person is not deprived of medical care, probably somewhere around 20 weeks...
>Similar to previous years, in 2021, women in their twenties accounted for more than half of abortions (57.0%). Nearly all abortions in 2021 took place early in gestation: 93.5% of abortions were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation; a smaller number of abortions (5.7%) were performed at 14–20 weeks’ gestation, and even fewer (0.9%) were performed at ≥21 weeks’ gestation
For medical conditions that threaten the life of the mother there shouldn't be a limit, the life of the host should never be compromised, though in late stage pregnancy when the fetus would be viable outside the womb care should be taken to take this avenue first.
We agree! (well I don't know that I would say exactly 20 weeks, but it would be somewhere around there, and I fully agree about life of the mother and also considerations for if the fetus can survive outside of the womb).
So this is an example of the individual nuance I mentioned above. But, if we were to have this discussion in a Democratic political setting, many (not all) would agree with us, but there would be quibbling over how we define "threaten the life of the mother" and also what sort of evidence/justification the doctor would need to provide (if any). Also if it hadn't happened yet, at some point here if you identify as a man, your opinion is out.
I think many people on here are misunderstanding that I'm criticizing the left but not the right. I think the right's position of life at conception is much more extreme than the average on the left. But there is definitely extremism on the left, and it tends to be at the party level.
Why keep out the context included in that bbc article?
> Under current Virginia law, third-trimester abortions are only permitted if the risk to the mother's life is "substantial and irremediable" - language that Democrats wanted removed.
> The Democratic bill sought to allow for late-term abortions if the mother's physical or mental safety were at risk .
> The procedure would also have required sign-off by only one doctor, rather than the three required under existing law.
This isn't "let anyone have an abortion at any time", like you're implying.
> This isn't "let anyone have an abortion at any time", like you're implying.
I implied nothing of the sort. I'm disappointed that you inferred that, and that tells me that I could do better in the future (although I'm not entirely sure how, see below), but it's still on you for making assumptions about what you think I believe based on my comment.
If you read my entire comment you'll see stuff like:
> Individual people often have considerable more nuance, but that nuance is not allowed in the political discussions in both major parties.
Please, show me where a major Democratic party discussion has taken place where they drew a line. I've shown you one already.
> On the left, if you try to draw a line at some point, if you are a man, you will be dismissed immediately and told that you have no right to tell women what to do with their bodies. Either gender, you will quickly end up in a position where you are trying to get between a woman and her doctor and trying to have the government make medical decisions. And that's the most charitable take they will have for you. Sometimes it can get much, much worse.
> You're right, you outright stated it, instead of implying it:
>> On the other side you argue for no restrictions, typically until the day before birth.
Thank you, fair enough. I didn't intend for the language to be that harsh/hyperbolic, but reading it again as you pointed out it certainly did come out that way. I withdraw the statement.
My anecdotal experience discussing this has mostly been as I said, but that cannot be fairly extrapolated and applied so broadly. (I would still standby that IME there are plenty of extremists on both sides in the US though. Though there's probably some selection bias at play here because the extremists are probably more likely to discuss it in the first place)
>> On the other side you argue for no restrictions, typically until the day before birth.
>> The Democrat who sponsored the measure said it would allow abortions at any point in pregnancy up until the point of childbirth in certain cases.
The phrase "in certain cases" clearly implies that there are, in fact, restrictions, so you're just wrong to go on the example you've provided. Further, you've said this position is "typical" and yet you only provided one example that doesn't even appear to actually support your claim.
I'll rollback my use of the word "typical" somewhat, but it is something I see commonly among people who are strongly/ideologically associated with the Democrat Party or consider themselves "very progressive."
And the example I provided was a proposed law, not just some random internet comment. If it was a proposed law, does it really seem unlikely that people would argue for it and/or believe it? Remember, the original context of this discussion is regarding uniformity of beliefs between people in Europe vs. people in the US
Uh huh in cases of "tragic or difficult circumstances, such as a nonviable pregnancy or in the event of severe foetal abnormalities. ... limited to the actions physicians would take in the event that a woman in those circumstances went into labour."
This is putting the scope of options available to emergency medicine doctors under the oversight of emergency medicine, rather than the additional scrutiny and oversight it currently gets as "abortion." This is not abortion as doctors understand it and I don't think as most lay users of the word do either.
> As soon as someone brings that up, one can savely ignore the rest of what they have to say on the subject.
Ah yes, the perfect example of our contemporary confirmation bias at work. As soon as someone says something you don't like, dismiss them on that and everything else.
I'm not an expert by any stretch on those topics, so I largely defer to people who are, but I see in them all a set of pros and cons, tradeoffs that we have to make.
Nuclear has enormous potential IMHO and I think we've missed opportunities by being so afraid it, though the issue of safety and waste disposal are very real. Nuclear could unlock lots of other potential energy technologies though including desalination and other things that take enormous amounts of power, because they burn 24/7 even when demand is low. We cold use that excess instead of wasting it.
Wind largely seems like not worth it, between the disruptions to birds and other wildlife, the huge resources involved to built and maintain it, and the unreliability of it, and general low power output, it doesn't seem to me like the best investment, with maybe a few exceptions like a particularly windy mountain pass or something.
Solar is wonderful, particularly the localization that it enables. The con with solar though is that it requires storage (batteries) because it only produces when the sun is shining. There may be some clever ways to work around that, but Lithium is already becoming harder to get and there are concerns about sustainability even just for building EVs. If we have to start putting huge battery banks in homes, that might not be sustainable/scalable.
That is a surprisingly balanced take, except the bird stuff.
My take, in very small nutshell:
- Nuclear is dead, by virtue of beingnto expensive and taking too long to build
- a combination of a more flexible grid, renewables (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and so on) is the way to go
- EV batteries don't really need lithium, do they?
- solar does not require storage for more than a couple of hours max (!), and the "clever ways" around storage do not require lithium, batteries or storage at all (demand side measures work just fine for yeaes now)
- wind is in some places intentionally held back, even in very suitable places based on BS arguments
- until we stop this pointless discussion aroind nuclear power, wind or no wind and the fact that the sun ain't shining at night, we will not get the necessary transition (which is already happening by the way) up to speed
The bird take is a dead giveaway of partial information; people starting from the point of view of caring about birds recognize that the direct impact is actually pretty small, compared to habitat loss, use of pesticides, glass buildings (yes really) and domestic cats. With a few exceptions for protecting very specific breeding sites.
My understanding is that French abortion protections are somewhat more conservative than those of Kansas, which for instance has a 21 week cutoff versus France's 14, and requires no additional consults or cooling off period.
Legally maybe. There's a massive difference in access though. Kansas has like two clinics for the whole state.
Also I'm not up to date on french abortion law or anything but people like to make these comparisons without taking into account medical-cultural differences that are extremely relevant. In the US an abortion cutoff is likely to truly be the last date you can access one at all, except maybe for life threatening medical situations but even that exception is being closed out. In the french model the cutoff date is the last date you can access one on your own initiative without significant barriers. After that they get increasingly difficult with a higher degree of medical and possibly legal scrutiny, but the threshold is still far below "you must be dying" for most of that time.
Which is great, but it seems that nobody is guaranteeing freedom of action to men.
Just as women should have the freedom from parenthood, so should men. But if a woman chooses to have a child, the man is still compelled to fatherhood, at least from a financial perspective.
And in France specifically, you have no right to know if you are actually the presumed father via paternity test.
So while this is some degree of progress, the already-enormous disparity of reproductive rights has widened even more.
Yeah, as a gay man I believe that men who have sex with women shouldn't be compelled into fatherhood just because they had sex, if that wasn't the intention.
Cruely, the answer usually seems to be "Well, don't have sex then". The only reproductive right men have at all is the choice to use the limited birth control available to them (condoms).
If they are lied to about their partner being on birth control then they are automatically out of the picture when it comes to choice around "what happens after". I would love to see a birth control pill for men, though the typical sexist response to that I've heard from many women is "men would just forget to take it as if we could trust them". Tables turning.
Without giving a position on the legitimacy of this question, I nevertheless point out to foreign observers that this, above all, shows to what extent France now assumes its colony status.
We are in the greatest demographic, energy and financial crisis since the Second World War and on the verge of armed conflict with Russia.
Our legislators have repeatedly refused to have a say on these issues in recent months, but while we had no problem with the status of abortion in France, they took up the issue as soon as there was a problem about it in the USA.
As they say at the UN and the European Commission: "always put a Frenchman at the head of all international institutions, they are the only ones who will never defend the interests of their country".
France is a colony? Who is their colonial overlord? And is this overlord also controlling the EU? And is this overlord truels suvereign, or does he answer to higher powers as well? If so, who are those powers, them? Because if it is them, I have a problem, they keep loosing my socks during laundery and it drives me crazy.
Abortion rights is absolutely not a cultural issue import from the US. While recent development about abortion rights in the US have sparked concern about those rights in France, they've been an ongoing fight for decades.
Some people call it imperialism, but for me US is more like an hegemon, a center which can impose its cultural norms to its periphery. But some people in France like to think that’s France is a US colony. I’m fine with that, because if it’s the case, french people are treated way better than the inhabitants of former french colonies.
Identity politics being an "import from the United States" to Europe is a laugh. During WWII's genocide was committed on the basis of identity. More recently in the Former Yugoslavia a war was fought with significant focus on national or religious identity. That's not even to mention the rote national identity politics present in European nations for at least 200 years.
It always existed, what didn't exist is using foreign events to attempt to explain local events.
For example you can't analyse French racism issues using the American history of slavery, the end result might be somewhat similar but the historical path is widely different. You can't use the French abortion history to analyse the American one either
I can't agree. If you look at the impact of Darwinism and "Social Darwinism" (English ideas) on Continental European politics in the lead up to WWI you would change your mind quickly. You can even go look at Christianity, a near-Eastern philosophy, and note how this form of identity politics is also foreign influence playing a role in domestic politics across Europe.
Sure. But one can take the occasion, and the fact US pro-life activists are everywhere from Ireland to Africa, and leap-frog this whole thing and ammend the constitution. Like, you know, accepting social and political realities and doing the right thing for once.
If you go that way you kind of have to admit laws have no power until they're made into the constitution, so everything you really care about and is threatened somewhere else in the world should be constitutionalised, that's not a small pandora's box. vasectomy ? lgbt rights ? same sex marriage ? unemployment benefits ? social security ? pensions ? where do you draw the line
Funny, a lot of the things you mentioned are either in the German Grindgesetz or enshrined in law. Partially as a reaction to movements trying to curb those laws.
Abortion in France was already a law, for decades, nothing was added nor removed by adding it to the constitution, and no one in France was questioning that right besides fringe sub 1% parties
So again, either the law is enough, and if it is enough it is enough for abortions, or it isn't enough for abortion, but in that case: which laws are constitution worthy and which aren't ?
You don't get it, do you? Putting it into the cobstitution clsed the door for something like the reversal on Roe v. Wade happening in the future. That is a good thing, that is what constitutions are there for.
You either don't get it, or want the door for such reversals to remain open. The former has been explained a lot by now, the latter would be disengenious.
And yet that's not the brand of identity politics popular in Europe. The popular one is the one imported from the US. Nobody thinks about Yugoslavia when it comes to identity politics, they think about race (specifically black) and queer. There were completely absurd BLM demonstrations around Europe and trans legislation only started being a subject after the US started dealing with it.
You think nationalism is not a popular brand of identity politics in Europe? Can you explain why you think that? In many nations in Europe nationalists have won elections even in recent years. In a more extreme case the idea that Ukrainian identity is "not real" is one of the often cited reasons for the Russian aggression against the Ukrainian state.
Actually trans legislation was spearheaded by the UK Government with the Gender Recognition Act of 2004. It had been opposed before and has been opposed since, both by left-wing radical feminist groups and by conservatives, for different reasons. The US has been relatively late to this disagreement.
So? Still not a colony, right? Imperialism =|= colonialism, get your definitions right before you call me "friend", so much politeness I expect, even on the internet.
France tried to stay independent after the war. Hence the refusal to join NATO, the powerful cultural industry of the 60s, the nuclear industry after the 70s oil crisis, the attempts at a third way with the now BRICS countries.
Since the 80s, it's over, France has been led financially by Germany, culturally by the USA, and its politicians are trained abroad or work abroad after having done their worst inside.
Nuclear power is really the best example, France was the world leader, then the Germans pushed it to abandon everything including its future Phoenix program. France sold everything to the USA, and now the USA is launching a nuclear program in Eastern Europe, and they call it Phoenix...
It always puzzles me how people can get the fact, some tiny ones, and still come to completly false conclusions.
E.g. NATO membership means a country isn't souvereign (independent is notbthe correct term) anymore. Or ignoring that France was a foibding member of the EWG. Or believing Hermany controls the EU (a claim that dates back to the financial crisis of 2008 and was as wrong then as it is now), or that Germany (small correction, you actually mean the German Greens) forced France to halt nuclear power. Or ignoring that the US nuclear industry is doing not great, including after the purchase of French companies. I could go on, but you get the picture I hope.
Perfect encapsulation of this lack of sovereignty - not only is OP not sovereign, for all the reasons they mentioned, but OP is being imperially instructed that they are not even allowed to mention that they are not sovereign any more.
Demographic, energy and financial crisis in France ? This sounds such a French perspective ("everything is so bad in our country") that ignores so many other places were the problems are real and widespread.
We had a global pandemic that blocked the whole world for a couple of years and a war that required changes to the whole energy strategy. I think France is doing quite ok given that.
I get your point, but really, I wish we did this same thing here in Spain.
Roe v Wade brought the issue up to many people, and I was appalled at how many of my colleagues and friends were dismayed at the idea of the constitution not backing up the right to abortion, some crazy people those in the US huh?
...Except we don't have such constitutional protection in Spain either. We just have a law. If it is the opinion of society that the constitution ought to give a right, It's a great thing for the country to take that into account and actually walk the walk.
France amending its 66-year old Constitution to include abortion is a “world first.” Few Europeans would assert that their constitutions already guaranteed such a right before those country’s regulated abortion under civil law. The ECHR has repeatedly declined invitations to find such a right in the EU Declaration of Human Rights. Meanwhile, many in America denounce the Supreme Court for observing that our 235 year old constitution isn’t any different from those (often much younger) European constitutions in that respect.
Highly intelligent legal experts in the form of Supreme Court justices determined that states can’t ban abortions. Other equally intelligent legal experts in the form of Supreme Court justices determined otherwise. Both sets of people wrote cogent opinions in support of their position. What is one to make of these facts? The Constitution says what you want it to say and you can write a well written, well reasoned argument supporting what you want it to say.
Our Constitution, in reality, is much more than the words written in it. It’s morphed due to judicial precedent over the course of 200 or so years.
It's more fundamental than that even. The constitution is in fact powerless without people. That's it. If you don't have the people there's nothing the constitution can do about it.
Might is right, in that dead people don't get to decide anything. If the next generation growing up decided to not respect Congress, then in a generation the entire institution would cease.
The point of comparison to European constitutions is that their highly intelligent people are smarter about what they’re willing to make up out of thin air. European constitutions have way more meat on them out of which to read in a right of abortion than ours.
And people much more versed on the law than you and I (I know you are a lawyer) believe it wasn’t made “up out of thin air”. You didn’t understand the point I made. Your opinion and whether or not abortion in the U.S. is a constitutional right is not objectively the correct one. Well meaning experts with more expertise than you disagree with your characterization.
When Roe was decided, a liberal law professor stated that it is “bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”
Hardly anyone defend’s Roe’s original reasoning anymore, because it makes no sense. That’s why over the decades the defense of Roe has largely been reduced to the assertion that it’s precedent. It’s the left’s Lochner.
Invoking “experts” is unavailing because those experts are not speaking within the scope of their expertise. Their assertions are in the realm of moral philosophy, not law. It’s a religious edict within the church of secular humanism.
Hardly anyone defend’s Roe’s original reasoning anymore, because it makes no sense.
The government doesn't have the right to force one person to risk their life for another. In this sense one can reasonably argue that one has a constitutional right to an abortion.
Serving in the military in time of war is not the same thing as "forcing someone to risk their life for another" as I meant it. I'll be more precise.
The government does not have a right to force me to directly use my body or parts of it to save your life. Thus is the essence that some lawyers have argued and reasoned.
> The government does not have a right to force me to directly use my body or parts of it to save your life. Thus is the essence that some lawyers have argued and reasoned.
According to whom? And even if you believe that, why does that mean the constitution bakes in that belief?
You're right it doesn't but they can regulate what operations a surgeon can perform and what drugs can be prescribed which is de-facto regulating whether or not an abortion can be performed.
It is ironic that you don’t understand the point made given what the topic is about. Your logic is badly flawed. You have not shown that no one with equal or more knowledge and expertise than you can give a well reasoned opinion contrary to what you have stated.
Your reasoning skills are quite lacking. Your response to my so called argument from authority is to...wait for it....appeal to an authority. That is quite ironic!
I did not argue form authority but because I was not advancing the idea that abortion is a constitutional right. I was advancing the idea that there are experts who think it is. And experts who think otherwise.
But it is not a logical fallacy to use the opinions of an expert in their area of expertise. You know virtually nothing about quantum mechanics and in a discussion about quantum mechanics it is valid to defer to what an expert says on that topic. Indeed, the court system understands the value of expert testimony for good reason. They know that using an expert in their area of expertise is valid and carries weight. Of course that does not mean experts are always right. Just means they know more than you.
None of this is germane to the point I made. I was not arguing from authority. I was talking about what I originally wrote versus what you replied with. Read what I originally wrote. Your point made no sense unless you can show that it is universally agreed by judges (or other experts in law) that there is no constitutional basis for a right to an abortion.
Friend, your ad hominem comments in this thread are really billboarding your naivete. There are many things that Rayiner and I disagree about, but he's a brilliant lawyer who clerked for a federal circuit-court judge (one of the most-prestigious positions there is for new lawyers) and who has impressive techie credentials from before that. It's painfully obvious that you have little or no idea how judges go about deciding hard cases under American law — what they're required to do; what they're prohibited from doing; what they're given leeway to do if they deem it appropriate.
Mentioning that he is a brilliant lawyer is, in Rayiner's opinion, a logical fallacy. You are engaging in what he thinks is bad reasoning in support of him.
I think it is a fact that courts do sometimes use expert testimony. If that is not the case then strike that portion from my response to rayiner. It isn't needed to make my point which is that relying on expert advice is not an argumentative fallacy.
It is strange that a brilliant lawyer and technologist would try to refute the citing of an expert's opinion by referencing a website. You can see the irony in that, right? You do realize that referring to an "authority" is not a valid way to advance the notion that referring to authorities is wrong, right?
Look, we can appreciate that you're trying to construct an argument, but you're out of your depth here, in roughly the way that someone who does a quick Google search about a disease takes it upon him/herself to proclaim that world-renowned expert researchers don't know what they're talking about. A dollop of epistemic humility would be in order.
Likewise. Appealing to rayiner's expertise is extremely strange when it is done to support their belief that appealing to authority is logically invalid.
I think you don't understand the points I made. They could be wrong but not for the reasons anyone here has yet advanced.
This is what I wrote:
Highly intelligent legal experts in the form of Supreme Court justices determined that states can’t ban abortions. Other equally intelligent legal experts in the form of Supreme Court justices determined otherwise. Both sets of people wrote cogent opinions in support of their position. What is one to make of these facts? The Constitution says what you want it to say and you can write a well written, well reasoned argument supporting what you want it to say.
Our Constitution, in reality, is much more than the words written in it. It’s morphed due to judicial precedent over the course of 200 or so years.
I'm not advancing the notion that abortion is a right or that it isn't a right. I'm not making any legal arguments whatsoever except to say that legal experts disagree on matters of constitutional law. I'm not making an appeal to authority to advance my argument because I'm not saying that my conclusion:
Our Constitution, in reality, is much more than the words written in it. It’s morphed due to judicial precedent over the course of 200 or so years.
is supported by anyone with legal expertise. I'm just saying that there is no single objectively true way to decide what is or isn't a constitutional right as I see it. This is an opinion I have and I gave the reasons I have for this opinion. If someone want to refute this conclusion of mine they need to demonstrate that there is a single objectively true way to decide constitutional rights.
If I'm wrong please let me know what this single objectively true way is.
Referencing appeal to authority has nothing to do with my point. Referencing rayner's legal expertise is not germane to anything I wrote. His reasoning in response to what I wrote is quite bad.
It is a fact that referencing an "authority" to advance the notion that referencing authorities is a logical fallacy is bad reasoning.
> Our Constitution, in reality, is much more than the words written in it. It’s morphed due to judicial precedent over the course of 200 or so years. — is supported by anyone with legal expertise.
A majority of current, GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices disagree with you.
And originalism is one way of interpreting the Constitution. There are other methods that other legal experts employ. Which is my only point. There is no single objectively correct way to interpret the Constitution. So it’s incorrect, for the most part, to say, “this is what the Constitution says/means”. One should say, “this is what i think it means.”
Your point about the expert testimony in court is an excellent example of my point. Jurors aren’t required to believe experts. Experts must get on the stand, and persuade the jury. Expert testimony is only as good as its ability to persuade a jury of ordinary people. So saying “experts agree” means nothing if you can’t point to a cogent explanation from an expert.
The SCOTUS found two different answers in the "text" of the constitution depending on who was appointed to it. Which is the risk of a pure legalistic approach; it's difficult for a right to survive against a majority that actively oppose it.
“Privacy” isn’t in the constitution either. Griswold all but admits that, asserting that the privacy right can be found in “penumbras” (I.e. that it’s manufactured out of thin air).
4: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
5: No person shall […] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
9: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
10: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
To be clear, a majority of people in the USA support access to abortion, its the fact that a minority court was packed with gerrymandered districts and a political party dead set on ending democracy that we got here.
That narrative turns the facts upside down. Was the Supreme Court wrong to ignore public opinion in 1973, when the citizens of every state banned abortion through their duly elected legislatures? Or is it wrong to ignore public opinion now?
In reality, the Supreme Court in 1973 subverted democracy by striking down abortion laws every state had adopted through the democratic process. In 2022, the Supreme Court restored the issue to the democratic process.
> In reality, the Supreme Court in 1973 subverted democracy by striking down abortion laws every state had adopted through the democratic process. In 2022, the Supreme Court restored the issue to the democratic process.
This is basically true, and a really serious indictment of democracy in America. All sorts of important rights, such as racial equality and equality of marriage (not just gay marriage, but interracial marriage!) had to be secured through legal action against a tyrannical and indifferent majority.
It in no way turns facts upside down, it simply responds to the word majority and the current events, it's the facts to say that the supreme court did the opposite in the 1970s.
If you think “democracy” matters, then the Supreme Court got it wrong in 1973 (by overturning laws that states adopted through the democratic process) and got it right in 2022 (by returning the issue to the democratic process).
First of all, the Constitution can be changed, like it has been in this case.
Secondly, it says that “The law determines the conditions under which [..] (it) is exercised”
So it can be made hard enough to challenge the right to abortion, like it is now in Italy, where it is virtually fully granted, but practically impossible in some areas, due to a Constitutional reform (ironically) that transitioned the healthcare from a national system to a regional one. So it depends on who's in charge in the region.
Since 2001, a decisive transition is taking place, from decentralisation to true federalism, according to the principle of subsidiarity. As of 2001, the national health fund has been abolished and substituted by taxation yield directly attributed to Regions and autonomous Provinces
The Tenth Amendment makes explicit two fundamental constitutional principles that are implicit in the document itself.
•The federal government is only authorized to exercise those powers delegated to it.
•The people of the several states retain the authority to exercise any power that is not delegated to the federal government as long as the Constitution doesn’t expressly prohibit it.
People dennounce the SCOTUS for throwing out precedent, and allowing state laws threating access to family planning and directly threatening the life of women. The age of the, honestly, sub-par constitution of the USA has nothing to do with it.
Why would it, though? It already guarantees body autonomy. So does my country's constitution.
No need to be more specific - actually that might be for the worse - states/lawmakers could start arguing it has to be explicit about every possible procedure like in the abortion case.
As George Clooney so brilliantly pointed out in Three Kings: Necessity and Priorities. The EU has a lot stuff on their plate, from Ukraine to Gaza. One thing at a time.
And yes, it seems that for the time being, abortion is not really ubder threat in the EU at the moment, so they can focus on other things. I applaud France for doing this, and hope the EU, and more member nations, do follow suite in the future.
Well then they should understand that a mother might choose - or be forced - to stop supporting the fetus with her body. It's not like they're cutting the fetus open, they're cutting the mother open (or giving her drugs).
They might say - it killed the fetus. Yes. Sometimes people disconnect the life support.
That is surely something you can take up in discussion with people who are anti-abortion, but back to my original question: Why can't the EU Declaration of Human Rights not just be amended to include a right to abortion?
As I said, to prevent states, courts and lawmakers from claiming that all other body autonomy rights have to be explicitly listed. It's general language for a reason. The declaration is good as it is, IMHO your suggestion would lead to weakening it.
Some people who are against abortion do not consider a fetus as part of the mother's body, so this is not unambiguously an issue of bodily autonomy. Should the declaration not at least be amended to state that a fetus is part of a mother's body then?
I don't think it's necessary. Abortion is disconnecting the fetus from the mother - that's definitely related to the bodily autonomy of the mother, regardless of whether the fetus itself is considered part of it or not.
I myself am not sure if I consider the fetus a part of the mother or not. There definitely is a point when it is no longer a part of the mother and I don't think it's only at birth. But regardless of the exact transition point, the mother has the right to decide what is connected to her body.
Sure... In what EU country is it criminal to have drugs in your blood? I don't know about any. Somewhere you might get a fine if you're caught holding some, but it's not criminal anywhere I know of. The trend around here is full decriminalization of use and small holdings for personal usage.
You certainly could amend the EU Declaration of Human Rights to protect abortion. My point is that, in Europe, courts have deferred to the democratic process on “rights.” The EU Declaration of Human Rights even contains an explicit provision, Article 8, addressing the “right to respect for private and family life.” The EHCR could have read that to imply a right to abortion. But they knew that’s not what that provision meant.
The EHCR did the same thing with same-sex marriage. It declined to read Article 12, which guarantees a right to marriage, to confer a right to same-sex marriages.
The article is actually missing the point slightly.
The French right wing of the senate has made this seemingly unimportant edit: it's not a right to abortion, it's a freedom.
This changes everything.
If it's a freedom, the job of the government is to ensure that nobody can stop you from doing it, but unlike with a right, it has no obligation of means, it doesn't have to fund free abortion clinics, make sure that hospitals are properly staffed, that every woman on the French territory has actually access to a clinic without travelling long distances or paying an unaffordable price.
Thanks for pointing this out. While this is a symbolic victory, this is not going to ensure French women have safe and affordable access to abortion, especially when Planned Parenthood faces funding problems and smear campaigns while practitioners can still exercise a conscience clause to deny abortion care.
it simply means that your freedom is guaranteed, not the actual right.
legalese is a very sneaky duolingo.
In the Italian constitution the catholics replaced the sentence in the first article proposed by the left "Italy is a democratic Republic founded on workers." with "Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labour." which completely changed the intended meaning (it works much better in Italian where workers is "lavoratori" and labour is "lavoro", they look and sound very similar, but are not the same thing).
I knowm I also know enough about law to tell that removing a freedom is a far cry from removing a "guaranteed freedom". And of course the press is reporting, the right has to claim a victory, the topic itself and the far right whining guarantee clicks.
> The French right wing of the senate has made this seemingly unimportant edit: it's not a right to abortion, it's a freedom.
How are 'conflicting freedoms' resolved? If two people have freedom of bodily autonomy, is there a priority?
Or taking a step back, what responsibilities (if any) do we have towards other people?
> Plenty of philosophers have argued that personhood hinges on rational capacity: that a being cannot be said to be owed the rights and protections promised in the Declaration of Independence unless it is capable of higher-level reasoning or unless it has, among other things, a sense of self, and can desire not to be killed. Personhood understood in this way legitimizes abortion at any stage, since what is killed does not, on this view, have rights. But it also legitimizes the killing of infants and young children, of the severely mentally disabled, and some of those suffering from dementia.
> If one rejects this restrictive, ableist understanding of personhood, what are the other options? Some philosophers point out that we do tend to make assessments of moral worth on capacity, but that we tend to make those assessments not on individual capacity, but on the capacities characteristic of the species to which the individual in question belongs. We think it worse to kill a dolphin than an ant because dolphins as a species have more sophisticated rational capacities than ants do. If we understand personhood in this way, then all members of our species — the elderly, the mentally disabled, infants and fetuses — are people.
[…]
> It is possible, of course, to acknowledge the personhood of the fetus and still defend abortion. Half a century ago the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, conceding that the fetus becomes a person well before birth, famously argued that the personhood of the fetus does not make the mother’s decision to kill it unjust. Killing the fetus is unjust, Thomson argued, only if the mother first agrees to carry it. But this, again, is a philosophical question. Do we owe others only what we agree to owe them?
> Some philosophers, like Thomson, think so, but very many philosophers disagree. If I live alone in the woods and wake one day to find an infant on my doorstep, am I obligated to care for it? Or may I simply step over it and go on about my day, until it dies from exposure and neglect? To think I am obligated in justice to help it, as a great many people (philosophers and non-philosophers alike) do, is to think we owe things to other people simply because they are people. And if we can owe things to other people simply because they are people, then Thomson’s argument falls apart. If the fetus becomes a person long before birth — as even Thomson concedes — and if we can owe things to people simply because they are people, then we can owe things to the fetus as well, long before birth.
What is the zygote/fetus/whatever? Is it human? If it is human, is it a person? When / At what point does it/he/she go from being a not-a-person to being a person? Why at that point and not some other? Do we have any responsibilities to the (non-)persons?
Is it possible to have "objective" answers to any of these questions, or are they 'simply' determined by "subjective" feelings?
This is a phylosophical question, French law is quite clear-cut about it: an unborn baby is not a person, therefore it has no rights. To the point that recently a famous person had a car accident while driving under drugs influence, the pregnant woman in the other car lost her unborn baby. No muder or manslaughter charges could be held, because according to the law, nobody was killed.
GOOD. There shouldn't even be a question about this. I have family members who would have died if the current state of abortion bullshit in the US had been a thing.
All these fucks voting out protections THEY ENJOYED their entire reproductive lives is so damn infuriating.
This isn't about that scenario. In case you get an abortion for a purely medical reason you can abort at any point in the pregnancy, 1 week or 9 months, it doesn't matter.
The one we just put in the constitution is the type of abortion you can request for any reasons up to 14 weeks
At this point its like school shootings. Vote for people trying to fix the issue and hope someone in power, that opposes that position, loses a loved one, due to that position, when you hear about the problem in the news [1]. The only person so far that seems to have gotten worse after experiencing gun violence themselves is Scalise
Why not, but abortion in France wasn't threatened in any way. It seems to me like a marketing coup from far-left parties who are utterly powerless when it comes to economic policies.
Also I'm not sure what's the extent of this right. In France, AFIU in normal circumstances, you can't legally abort after 14 weeks. Is that challenged by this new constitutional rule?
EDIT: even though Macron ultimately proposed this, it was initiated by a far-left representative, Mathilde Panot. Her party, LFI, advertises this as their own victory.
> Mathilde Panot, présidente du groupe La France insoumise à l'Assemblée nationale, a été à l'initiative de la proposition de loi constitutionnelle pour garantir le droit à l'IVG.
Abortion was sensitive in France when it was voted in the early 70ies.
Few people in France oppose abortion laws as they are today, but the abortion restrictions are quite different compared to the US. E.g. abortion time limit in France are much shorter in "usual" cases, ~3.5 months. It was 3 month until quite recently, and that extension was controversial.
[edit] controversial, but nowhere near as controversial as abortion is in the US. I wonder how controversial extension to 2nd or 3rd trimester would be in France. Those later-terms are legal only under exceptions in France (rape, danger to the mother, etc.).
To badly quote Simone de Beauvoir:
"One political, religious or economic crisis will be enough to challenge women's rights, our rights. Throughout your life, you must remain vigilant".
GP is right that things seem unthinkable do not stay unthinkable for eternity.
Abortion was illegal in France until 1975. It was legalized by the legislature, and the challenge to the law went up to the Court of Cassation, which upheld the law ruling that the government can properly regulate abortion (which includes permitting it up to 12 weeks, as the 1975 law did).
Two years earlier, the US Supreme Court had struck down any state regulation of abortion prior to viability (around 22-24) weeks. Effectively, it imposed an abortion regime far broader than France’s by judicial fiat.
france isn't us, but we've seen how dangerous it is, instead of hoping to not get in this situation ever, why not engrave this in constitution so that changing it again would be extremely hard?
Some people don't like the French solution precisely because it is very hard to reverse it now. Downplaying the risk of a French, or European, version of throwing out Roe v. Wade is the easiest way to keep that particular door open.
And pretending that not to be the case, well, I feel insulted by being played for an idiot.
Why make things up and assume when you could spend the time you took to write your comment to read the facts?
> from far-left parties
No. Emmanuel Macron, the president, fairly right-sided, pushed it and then everybody welcomed it except some people at the right.
Now of course he could use something good for his image, he pretty much pissed most people a few months ago with how he used every non democratic ways he could to push his retirement reform despite a majority of people being against it (including people mostly agreeing with the content of this reform, but not comfortable with how he handled it).
Actually far-left sided parties are vanishingly small and wouldn't have the power to push something like this.
> who are utterly powerless when it comes to economic policies
Off-topic and not needed here.
Edit to answer the edit: La France Insoumise is hardly far left. It is roughly between le parti socialiste which had almost vanished two years ago, and le parti communiste, itself before Lutte Ouvrière and the NPA. I believe "far" is synonymous with "ideas I really don't like" and better avoided anyway. It doesn't do any good, let's properly reject bad ideas with proper arguments instead.
Far left parties aren't represented in the parliement. In fact, one of them only partakes in elections for executive power.
How to spot far-left: they want to go beyond representative democracy: direct democracy and/or autogestion are their desired end goal. They want to remove executive power (no mayor or president by default), and their view on legislative power differ too much to matter
LFI '6th republic' still is a representative republic, with a more participative glow than the 5th, but is basically the same. They are pro-constitutionalists (basically it mean they will respect the judicial power), want to weaken the executive power but not remove it, to go back to a more northern European kind of democracy.
Far right is basically antidemocracy. That can have different form, recently in France, attacks on elected officials, or on judges.
I'm not sharing any personal views on LFI. But they are classified as far-left and they do claim this victory. It's all over French news. Not sure what your arguing against.
From [1] > Mathilde Panot (French pronunciation: [matild pano]; born 15 January 1989) is a far-left French politician who has presided over the La France Insoumise group in the National Assembly since October 2021.
Then, "La France Insoumise" claims the victory and brand this law as "loi Panot" on their own youtube page [2],
By whom? Some small portion of its detractors? Anyway, no need for spreading wrong ideas, regardless the number of people claiming them. French Wikipedia claims this but this is unsubstantiated. Qualifying it as "far" just serves the purpose of wrongly likening it to the Rassemblement National, which is convenient for Macron & its friends. Consequences of LFI or the RN gaining power are radically different.
Now for sure it's not "soft" left.
I believe you when you say LFI pushed this idea. That's very like them.
"politics" is very broad. Should I mention Bézier curves when discussing instruction sets just because both are related to computer science, without any other connection?
This inflammatory gratuitous hot take without any evidence to prove it on a subject unrelated to the discussion at hand (far left parties are not especially more related to this new constitutional abortion right than any other party) just doesn't belong here and will probably not lead to interesting discussions. Whether it is true or not.
> Emmanuel Macron, the president, fairly right-sided, pushed it and then everybody welcomed it except some people at the right.
LFI (france far left party) wants to call this "Loi Panot" and claim the victory. Panot is the LFI representative who has initiated this law. Macron eventually thought it would be good to surf this wave.
> Dans une publication partagée sur X, le groupe parlementaire a réalisé un montage illustrant Mathilde Panot, la cheffe de file des Insoumis, aux côtés de Simone Veil, icône de la lutte contre la discrimination des femmes en France. « On l'a fait ! » illustre l'image avec « #LoiPanot ».
Okay, LFI pushed it. LFI has its issues but is hardly far left, see my edit. It's just one of the bigger left parties.
Also see, you mentioned "far left parties". That felt undocumented, and looked like a platitude. It's one party, for starters. Hand wavy statements will just gather evasive and inaccurate answers.
To be honest, I initially imagined you were not French and making undocumented claims on French politics, I now understand you are French (you stated it).
Emmanuel Macron's party rejected it twice in 2018 and 2019, when it was promoted by left-wing parties, and only changed its mind after the US Supreme Court decision [0]
Macron isn't far left by any stretch of the imagination haha.
As for the conditions, the French constitution usually states general principles so it won't and doesn't need to be as precise as having a number of weeks.
> As for the conditions, the French constitution usually states general principles so it won't and doesn't need to be as precise as having a number of weeks.
So will it make a practical difference or is it just a gesture?
but the current laws, which (as is typical in Europe) have far lower term limits than many US states, the UK or (IIRC) anglophone countries in general is not affected?
I agree with your takeaway and had the exact same question: does this mean there is a constitutional right to abort at any age, or do the prior legal limits apply? So far I cannot find an answer even in French papers.
Edit: actually, it does state that the [current] law determines the boundaries of that protection.
It's 14 weeks 'no question asked' abortion. For non-medical reason it can be pushed further, as long as 3 third party (2 doctors and a social worker) say 'ok'. Further than that, it's only for medical reasons, again if 2 (or 3?) doctors say you should do it.
I've actually had this discussion two years ago? With a doctor who specialized in finding out genetic defects in the 90s, basically it's very rare to have abortion after the 14th week, and it's only when some developmental issues are found, or when carrying the pregnancy is dangerous (in some cases labor is induced while the pregnant woman under anesthesia, but the fœtus is known to be unviable, those forced labor seems to be the worst situation mentally for patient and sometime medical personnel)
> “The law determines the conditions under which the freedom guaranteed to women to resort to voluntary termination of pregnancy is exercised”
So it doesn't really address the issue, it just uses the words "voluntary termination of pregnancy" associated with guaranteed freedom for the first time in history.
There was only one major group that spoke out against the decision: the Catholic Church.
Almost half of the French population reported that they were Catholic in a 2020 survey, but it's clear that when it comes to abortion, almost no French Catholics are influenced by the Church's strong opposition to abortion.
That's in stark contrast to the US, where opposition to abortion, mostly among Christian denominations, has remained an intractable issue. People predicted that after Roe V. Wade was decided, opposition to abortion would fade away, but it never did. Indeed, for the better part of 50 years, opposition fluctuated only a few percentage points, unlike almost every other major social issue.